The Differences Between Gamification And Game-Based Learning  Gamification strategies are increasingly getting attention and investment in eLearning. In today’s high-pressure world, when everyone is working tight schedules, we tend to learn well only when it’s enjoyable or obviously beneficial to us - and games definitely make the learning more enjoyable. According to Engagement Alliance, the gamification industry is predicted to reach $5.5 billion by 2018. Games keep learners engaged and motivated - 80% of learners feel that game-like learning or jobs could make them more productive (Talent LMS). But it’s high time that we get gaming concepts right; let’s have a look at what each of these means. Gamification  What Is Gamification?  Gamification means applying the game design techniques and game mechanics to engage and motivate learners to help them achieve their goals. Salient Features:  In gamification, the learning process as a whole is turned into a game. Game mechanics and elements are applied to existing content to engage and motivate the learners. Might include a collection of tasks with some form of rewards (without necessarily any defined learning objective). Points, levels, rewards, leaderboard, achievement badges, feedback loops, conditions are some of the key principals used in gamification. It is usually easier and cheaper to introduce gamification in learning. Benefits Of Gamification:  It encourages collaboration, fun, focus, retention, productivity, creativity, and meaningful choices. It is a great way to change behaviors or encourage specific behaviors, provide immediate feedback and gratification, and track progress. When To Use Gamification? Following are some of the situations when the use of gamification makes perfect sense: When you want to encourage the learners to take specific actions. When you want to motivate the learners and influence their behaviors. When you want to drive innovation and help the learners in building specific skills. When you wish to engage the learners while promoting the spirit of competitiveness. When you wish to provide the learners ways to track their own progress. Best Practices For Designing Gamification:  Keep the game mechanics and structure easy to understand and follow. Carefully align gamification with the business needs and learning goals. Make scoring and winning easy and transparent - keep simple rules and keep the leaderboards easy to understand. Gamification Examples:  Wall Street Survivors. Bunchball, in partnership with Wall Street Survivor, launched an online education platform which uses gamification to teach investment strategies to Millennials. Through a series of engaging and rewarding missions, users are taught a variety of stock market concepts. Keas. Enterprises use Keas, an employee wellness platform, to maintain the overall health of the organization, lower group health insurance costs, and reduce unnecessary sick days. The gamification in Keas provides the individuals with a personalized dashboard which shows the stats, allows them to earn awards for achievements on task completion, and also support the co-workers to help them achieve their goals. Game-Based Learning What Is Game-Based Learning?  Game-based learning is a teaching approach where the learners explore the relevant aspect of games in a learning context designed by teachers. Salient Features:  In game-based learning, games are used as part of the learning process. Game-based learning is aimed at teaching a specific skill or achieving a specific learning outcome. Game-based learning includes the content which is created to fit the story and scenes of the game. It helps in drawing the learners into the relevant virtual environments that they are familiar with. It is usually difficult and expensive to build game-based learning. Benefits Of Game-Based Learning:  It helps in motivating and influencing the learners in a positive way. It helps in providing context and engaging the learners. It helps in rememorizing the concepts in a fun way. It reinforces and consolidates the knowledge in a friendly environment. When To Use Game-Based Learning? Following are some of the situations when the use of game-based learning makes perfect sense: When you want to repackage existing academic content. When you wish to promote critical and strategic thinking amongst the learners. When you want to engage and motivate the learners who are otherwise not engaged. When you want to support the struggling learners in learning better. Best Practices For Designing Game-Based Learning:  Focus on the learning objectives. Strike the right chord while making it challenging - it should not be too easy and, at the same time, it should not be as difficult as to frustrate learners. Make the games interactive and immersive so that the learners can remain focused on the goals and objectives. Game-Based Learning Examples:  McDonald's. McDonald’s launched game-based learning system to its 300 restaurants; it allowed the employees to learn and practice in a safe environment online. The game was addictive, fun, and with well-thought learning objectives. It made the learning experience memorable with targeted skill and knowledge training. It helped the employees in improving their accuracy and reduce the service time by close to 8%. Microsoft. Microsoft’s Ribbon Hero game teaches the learners how to use the Microsoft Office’s ribbon interface. This game has "Clippy", the helpful paperclip, as the game’s protagonist. While the objective of learner engagement is common between gamification and game-based learning, they are two different things. Both offer tremendous benefits to your eLearning course, but it is important to know the different between the two so that you can optimally use the one which is relevant for the desired goals and the needs of the learners. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Learning Exchange: Tips On eLearning Tools Which tool to select for your job and how to get started using that tool is just the start. How to use that tool more efficiently and more effectively for your work adds a whole new level of understanding to the equation. So what can you do to broaden your understanding of what tools are out there for eLearning professionals and how can you learn to use those tools to the best of their ability? To help you better understand the tools in the eLearning space and how to use them The eLearning Guild is hosting a 30-in-30 learning event during the month November in the Learning Exchange.The eLearning Guild’s new social learning platform where members of the Guild community can share content and learn from one another. Each day in November a different member of The eLearning Guild community will be adding an eLearning tool tip or trick to the Learning Exchange. Tips shared during this event will come from Guild members who have discovered tips and tricks from using different tools over the years, practitioners who use these tools every day in their work, and experts in the industry. Of course, the Guild will be adding a few of their own resources to the mix that they have found to be popular among eLearning professionals working with eLearning tools over the years. Overall, this event is aimed at helping the eLearning community find resources that will help them do the work they love to do even more efficiently. For anyone who views and marks complete all 30 entries in the 30-in-30 course module in the Learning Exchange by the end of November will be entered into a drawing, held by The eLearning Guild, to win a $100 gift card to The Grommet!* Learn more about this 30-day learning event in the Learning Exchange at http://bit.ly/1MgTOsf. Not a member of The eLearning Guild but still want to check out these eLearning tool tips? Simply create a complimentary eLearning Guild Associate account and you will have full access to the Learning Exchange for one whole year! *Terms and conditions apply. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

How To Measure The Effectiveness Of An eLearning Course For Your Employees  In order to find out whether or not your employees have really picked up what you intended to teach them through eLearning, you need to set them up for some real-life challenges and see how they fare in them. Here I will share a couple of tips to measure the effectiveness of an eLearning course for your employees. Observe newly-imparted skills on the job. Large scale enterprises often make their employees undergo full-fledged training modules to understand their job responsibilities. One way to determine whether or not the employees have understood what they have been taught is to test them with some real-life tasks and ask them to apply their newly-acquired knowledge. At the same time, the task monitors should carefully observe them and make note of the changes in behaviors they display after knowing their job roles in greater detail. The few critical questions and observations to consider at this point include change in the employee’s behavior and attitude, improving on his existing skillset, confidence in explaining issues and resolving them, and more. It would be great if the task monitors could perform this exercise for each employee before and after they have attended the training. The comparative analysis would definitely fetch you better results. If they fail in any of the given tasks, you may want to revisit the training content and exercises. Ask for feedback from the employees. If you wish to measure the range of effectiveness that eLearning courses had on your employees, prepare a fluid questionnaire. You will find that the employees now won’t give you mechanical and rehearsed answers, but innovative ones. They would have gained practical experience from simulated atmosphere created in eLearning courses. The employees would be more clinical in tackling crisis situations; they would not necessarily wait for the directions from above. The employees would also be more adept at interacting with clients as also with other streams of their enterprise. The interflow would be more seamless than it ever was. The employees would, of course, be more motivated and updated and would hold the clue in most cases. They would be more adept at invoking sound strategies for the welfare of the company; for the uplifting of relations with clients; for optimizing productivity levels of the company on the whole. Note these three salient features. In a nutshell, you can emphasize and assess the effectiveness on three salient features; confidence level, aptitude, and energy. With these three pointers, the employees feel more full-on to take any event, opportunity, or crisis straight on. They also know that in the event of falling short, they can either take recourse to eLearning modules or undergo a fresh and relevant course. The advantage with the courses is that the instructor is fully aware of the learner’s strength and weakness. For instance, people from India are generally good at math and have to be fed in with theoretical concepts; people from Somalia would have to be taught in basic language, so on and so forth. Another advantage of eLearning courses is that they are dynamic and can easily be tweaked or changed after taking a peek at the learner’s credentials. For instance, if the learner is already at the Intermediate level, the instructor can exalt himself to expert teaching. This is not possible with physical education, where it is necessary to stick to the syllabus. You also have to interpret the significance of audio-visuals. We, as humans, are more likely to absorb the trends through seeing or hearing than through reading texts. Wonderfully crafted videos or podcasts can take learners so much close to grafting the inputs. This leads to confident and well-tuned employees, if you will. Calculate the Return On Investment (ROI). Did you ever try and calculate the ROI after an eLearning course has been successfully deployed? If not, you will never be able to know how much it has impacted your employees. The simplest way to do it is to estimate all the associated costs of the eLearning, starting from development until deployment and then measuring it against the benefits that you have received, for instance, improved productivity levels, increased sales, fewer complaints from your customers, etc. When you perform this exercise, you will easily get a cost-to-performance ratio that will help you in determining if the training was effective for your employees. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Big Ideas Fest 2015 theme is "Leading the Education Revolution" Big Ideas Fest 2015 convenes all education stakeholders in redesigning the future of education. ISKME's annual event is an extraordinary immersion into collaboration and design that focuses on transformational change in K-20 education. Creative doers and thinkers from diverse levels of education gather to learn from and share with each other. Breaking down silos and empowering champions, Big Ideas Fest places learning at the front and center of all that we do. The participants are inspirational. The work is dynamic. And the results are revolutionary. Big Ideas Fest 2015 believes answers and innovation are all around us. The event gathers top minds to share their work and ideas in an environment that encourages risk-taking and overall imagining of the impossible. Big Ideas Fest's unique format includes RapidFire talks from leading innovators; interactive networking with education's movers and shakers; and Action Collab design-thinking labs that engage groups to brainstorm, prototype, and ultimately create scalable solutions to cumbersome issues in education. Working across traditional silos in education, Big Ideas Fest 2015 engages participants from the ballroom stage to outdoor fire pits, from the hallways to the parking lot roof, and from face-to-face networking to inspiring rapid fire speakers, all infused with activities that inspire and activate new ideas.  That's a promise! Big Ideas Fest 2015 will be December 2nd-5th at the historic Hayes Mansion, San Jose, California. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Brain Matters 2015 One hundred years ago, an obscure patent clerk changed the way we view the world and became forever linked with the concept of genius. In honor of the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, the Brain Matters 2015 online conference will explore the amazing power inside our brains, unleashing our inner genius through neuroscience. This conference, taking place November 10-11, features Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, author of the New York Times best-selling book Triggers: Creating Behavior that Lasts - Becoming the Person You Want to Be. Also appearing will be neuroscientists, adult learning experts, teachers of the year, a mindfulness coach, a spiritual coach and other experts who know about the brain. See the full list of speakers at: http://learningtogo.info/conference/brain-matters-2015-conference-speakers/ On November 10-11, 2015, learning professionals around the world will gather online to explore the neuroscience of genius and how we can train our brains to be the best version of ourselves. You’ll come away with a deeper understanding of your own brain and some practical tips for enhancing its performance. This not an ordinary webinar, but a highly interactive virtual experience. As a conference participant, you will post questions and comments to interact in real time with our speakers, watch video, collaborate on a white board or join in the discussion using our Twitter back channel. The lounge offers a casual place for networking and browsing our online bookstore. No travel, no time away from your family - just two full days of rewiring your brain! Register now! Can’t attend the full program? No worries! All participants will have access to the recorded sessions after the event. You are invited to join us! Get your ticket today! Price: $147 US This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Why Virtual Reality May End Up Being A Flop   I suppose some Abraham Maslow fans might frown disparagingly if I posited, as a variant to his definition on self-actualisation, that "what technology can be, it must be"; but then again, such a statement might meet with an (un)approving glint in the eyes of those who suspect that the nefarious or uninformed intentions of our technology decision-makers will unavoidably lead to an all-powerful AI metrics "thing" monitoring its helpless population of chipped and tracked (useful) human slaves. "That introduction was overly conspiracy-theory." I say to myself. So from a different coign of vantage, basically, I would like to say that I am more interested in why things fail than in why things succeed. Whether it’s a lesson, business, relationship, debt-based monetary system or cutting edge technology, failure is far more intriguing than success. Moreover, and more interestingly, as it seems most people (by nature) don't relish listening to something that contradicts their firmly held beliefs, in the "human" world, many things fail. It is also regrettable that experiencing failure in many cases doesn’t lead to reflection immediately, and so an impetus is not given to the construction of a more sophisticated solution for a particular problem. One might therefore ask, and quite reasonably, why most humans are so surprisingly good at putting up, and for longer than one might expect, with bad things that are destined to fail; the answer is, I don’t know, but thankfully, there’s usually a harrowing awakening tipping point that drives change. For example, will better global awareness of nutrition lead to the possible bankruptcy of McDonald’s? "But what do I believe about virtual reality specifically?" I ask myself. I believe virtual reality will eventually be seen to be a bad error of judgement, and so for me it’s also interesting to think about what might ultimately replace it. Why Do I Believe This?  Technologies that succeed, succeed because they cater, by accident or by design, effectively for the needs of their human users. Even though technology advancement is unrelenting, our understanding of whom we are as human technology consumers is not evolving in tandem. On a cline, we’re actually thoroughly disappointing to utterly amazing; we’re unique at a granular level yet strangely similar at a macro needs’ level. When we learn from one another authentically, many valuable, intimate, and intricate subliminal learning events take place which may activate, for example, greater levels of motivation, self-esteem, critical thinking, emotional development, or compassion for others in society. We don’t just need our senses and kinetic bodies to learn, we need a mind and a heart. We’re a culturally-bound enigma that lacks self-understanding; we’re living in an insane, hierarchical, and resource-squabbling world too. We have the potential to destroy ourselves, yet we also have the potential to unleash/unharness a tidal wave of supreme human creativity which could propel us to the stars (boldly). And, technology is supposed to be bringing us closer, but sadly it appears to be pulling us apart. "But explain why virtual reality will fail." I ask myself. First, I need to describe how I keep abreast of developments in virtual reality. There is actually a glut of up-to-date virtual reality reading content out there: just look at emancipating, transparent and personalisable / just-for-me-access platforms such as Flipboard or Pinterest if you need convincing. Increasingly, as consumers of written content, we are source-overloaded and perpetually distracted. One might even assert that an unintended consequence of the act of being overwhelmed by the insurmountable task of trying to evaluate illimitable content may actually be the stifling of more important creative thinking. In this article I therefore have attempted to place the need to present my thoughts (creative or not) before digital virtual reality content curation. So What Are The Key Virtual Reality Trends? Talk to gamers first: most seem excited by its future capabilities. "But that’s too anecdotal, be more scientific!" I tell myself. Well, there's been an explosion of interest in virtual reality; the main areas of growth are gaming, improved social networking capabilities, entertainment, research, education, work-related and marketing. I've therefore been reading a lot about virtual reality recently. I’ve read, for instance, that the pricing and release dates of those outlandish-looking head mounted displays (HMDs) are not too clear, and as a result, the sedentary gaming community faces an onerous choice in 2016, i.e. discombobulated gamers have to decide which HMD is the best to buy; Oculus Rift (Facebook-owned), Sony PlayStation 5 VR, Samsung Gear VR, or HTC Vive are four hopeful contenders. I’ve also read that the streaming of "everyone-has-the-best-seat-in-the-house" live events, such as concerts, computer games, or sports, is "at least on paper" apparently a good idea to scale; virtual reality porn, on the other hand, seems to be booming. I’ve read Carl Zeiss AG thinks streaming from drones live is commercially viable, and I’ve read the New York Times is so enamoured with virtual reality that they are even planning to ship out Google Cardboard to over a million (to-be-possibly-bewildered) print subscribers. I’ve read that the Netflix developed app "allows wearers of the Samsung Gear VR headset to step into the Netflix Living Room and watch movies and TV shows in VR". But, if I tried to do that, I’m sure my head would be spinning after a few minutes. I’ve read about the snazzy Danish-company virtual reality suit and I’ve read that virtual reality is being used in medical research and mental health therapeutic application (by the way, isn't that an oxymoron?). I’ve read about the potentially lucrative German neuroscientists’ Alzheimer’s disease research, and I’ve also read that virtual reality is being tried as a way to help people with disabilities explore the world that might be difficult or impossible in real life. I’ve read about virtual reality employee training programmes and I’ve read that Deutsche Bahn "is experimenting with three-dimensional virtual reality films that give potential employees the chance to experience different jobs on offer before they apply". I’ve read that publishers like Square Enix and Wargaming strangely "aren’t creating VR games, but they’re using the medium to market games". But most interestingly, I’ve read that Oculus is making a point of flagging games with "locomotion" (Nota Bene virtual reality motion sickness) in their Oculus Home store, and I’ve read Sean Sullivan who notes, citing a virtual reality study on rats, that two senses (i.e. sight and sound) are not enough to trick the brain, "brain mapping may rely on tricking all five". Here’s Why I Think Virtual Reality Will Fail The foremost issue and worry for me about virtual reality is not whether the industry will get traction or collapse in light of the huge developmental costs. It’s not the potential motion sickness, (dis)comfort of the headset, or all that electronic stuff so close to the brain. For me, it’s the brazen attempt to hijack the brain itself with, quite frankly, a freaky looking contraption placed over our irreplaceable eyes. Also, virtual reality doesn’t, or rather can never, work the way our senses, body, and brain have been designed to work, i.e. the world we see naturally (on this spinning planet) doesn’t move when our body moves; in virtual reality, to move what we see (i.e. the virtual world), we have to move our body/head. There is a perilous difference here that must surely be puzzling and detrimental for our brains. The war is therefore on to deceive the brain, through our eyes and ears for the time being. Virtual reality is one of the weapons of attack, though, who knows, maybe in the future, transcranial or smart eyeball replacement :) weapons will be developed too. Sadly, the history of mankind is replete with examples of bad ideas. For me, virtual reality is saying "Look at me! (Twerkily) What more do you need?" It beguiles you into a world of shallowness and, like a drug, it’s giving you a harmful high. Our sensuous perception of our actual reality is undoubtedly not flawless, and we may even be part of a perfect matrix reality. However, we’ve been designed body and soul to participate in this galaxies-to-quarks reality, whether we like it or not. The thing that brings value to something for humans is collective trust in a thing, and as we collectively appear to believe what we see in the physical world is real, maybe we should not try to replace that with something that is not. So when I think about virtual reality, I tend to say "take a hike", i.e. meaning humorously, it should (eventually) go away and I should also (eventually) go for a walk in the mountains to enjoy the reality I’ve actually been designed to see. So maybe, referring loosely to Maslowian self-actualisation again, "technology can only be what we as humans must be", or put another way, technology should not try to unwire the hard-wiring we have as humans. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Reporting And The TalentLMS Case  If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Wikipedia describes this well known question as a "philosophical thought experiment that raises questions regarding observation and knowledge of reality". I'm not getting all philosophical on you; I just want to prepare you for a far more relevant question, closely related to the topic of this post: If you train people but have no feedback on their progress, have they been trained? The answer obviously is, you have no way knowing. Of course you could always wait until they try to apply that training to see whether they've really learned anything. But that might be too late (not to mention the potentially disastrous results). That's where your LMS platform's reporting facilities come in handy, and TalentLMS has plenty of those, which you can find in the aptly named "Reports" page. Drilling Into Reporting  A reporting tool, of course, needs something to be reporting on, and TalentLMS lets that something be Users, Courses, Branches, Groups, Tests, and Surveys. In short, all the major objects that the platform supports can be examined in your reports. There's also a general view that shows a few system-wide statistics, such as user logins. After you've selected a report subject you're shown the various statistics collected on them. For example if you click to see "User Statistics" and select the user you're interested in, TalentLMS can report on their Logins, Courses, Certifications, and Timeline information. You can define the desired reporting period (default being the present day), either by setting a start and end date, or by selecting any of the predefined ranges ("Yesterday", "Week", "Month", "Year"). You can also drill-in to get more information for any specific item, e.g. in the report of the users certifications you can click on a certificate to see its contents, date of issuance and so on. Courses, Branch, Group, Test, and Survey reports work in the same manner, and are similarly interconnected (clicking on a specific test you can see the list of users that took it, etc.). For Tests and Surveys you can further view individual responses or analyze the Answers distribution. When a report becomes unwieldy (e.g. a user listing with hundreds of users), TalentLMS allows you to narrow down the items shown through searching and filtering for specific matches. To share a report with others or process its results in a third party system, such as your ERP or CRM, TalentLMS allows you to export it in the Excel and CSV file formats. When the built-in reporting capabilities don't cut it, TalentLMS allows users (subscribed to the "Plus" plan and upwards) to create custom ones based on the activity they wish to track, and even perform mass actions on them (e.g. to Activate or Deactivate all the users included in a report, to add them from a Branch, etc.). This way of working with mass actions can result in substantial time savings, especially for larger TalentLMS deployments with lots of users. Last, but not least, TalentLMS lets you schedule reports to be generated and sent to any set of recipients you want at specific intervals. Perfect for keeping your learners, instructors, or boss in the loop. Reporting For Duty As most things in TalentLMS, the reporting system was created to be both easy to use and flexible enough to cover all common reporting needs. Unlike the reporting options found in lots of enterprise packages, TalentLMS reports don't take a rocket scientist to setup. And you don't need to be one to get started with TalentLMS in general, either. Just visit http://www.talentlms.com/create and take it for a test drive today! This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Can You Turn Learners Into Gamers? Here Are 3 Simple Ways To Gamify Your Digital Learning Three core instructional principles underlay gaming design in digital learning: Engagement and motivation, challenge, and accomplishment. In this article, I’ll dive into these principles and show you some simple ways to gamify your digital learning. 1. Focus on engagement and motivation. Games are about the player’s journey from novice to master. This is what makes them engaging or even addictive. Think of your learners like gamers; build your digital learning in a way that encourages learners to reach the next stage. Chunk up your content. Present learners with a series of small achievable challenges or steps along the way to reaching an overall goal. Use quests. High levels of interactivity like quests can engage and motivate people. You can get started with a simple question or quiz interaction. Remember to create an experience for learners even when they fail. Good learning happens when your learners can learn from mistakes, so make sure you provide great feedback. Good learning also shows learners where they went wrong and gives them a chance to try again. I find this helps to keep learners motivated to continue. Video is a great medium to use for feedback in a challenge. Utility Warehouse uses video feedback well in its New Starter Training program. Short talking-head videos are placed on response layers in interactive question screens to coach learners and provide relevant information regardless of the answers they selected. Here’s another example of an engaging eLearning program that has multiple small, achievable challenges (built with Elucidat): 2. Make it a challenge.  Design your course with lots of small incremental challenges so you can keep learners motivated to improve their skills or knowledge. Make these challenges achievable or level-based, and provide feedback and branching to keep the course relevant and engaging. A simple but effective example of this is demonstrated in a mini course called Preventing Fraud (built with Elucidat): In this example, learners can jump to the next stage of the course only if they respond correctly to a challenge. Learners are taken on different twists and turns until they reach the desired outcome. Tip 1: Set a score. In the Preventing Fraud example, a "score" is set to lock the level by setting the value to "greater than" and setting the score slider to 50%. With this rule set up in this way, learners will only be able to get to this part of the course if they have scored 50% up to this point in the learning. This is useful if you want to create a page that learners can view only if they have attained a score over 50% and have seen 50% of the course. Tip 2: Add rules. Adding rule groups allows you to organize your rules and use both "AND" and "OR" statements simultaneously. Like so: Related: Learn how to use branching and the rules function in Elucidat City Witness utilized Elucidat to set up complex branching using "rules". Complex branching ensures your learners’ journeys are based on the decisions they make at each stage. Draw inspiration from this eLearning program by City Witness called Medieval Swansea: Medieval Swansea is an interactive historical game that enables learners to take on the role of a detective to solve a mystery. Learners must complete challenges to unlock stages. Here are some of the gamification features I liked in Medieval Swansea: Scenario learning. Learners choose their journeys by completing interactive challenges and quests. Storytelling. Narrates the different stages and character witnesses. Progression. Dynamic map shows player-learners what stage they are at and what’s left to do. Dynamic polling. Vote on solving the mystery and see how other players are voting. Challenging. Lots of opportunities to gather points and bonuses that can unlock future stages. 3. Create a sense of accomplishment.   Learners need to have their progress affirmed. I bet you love taking tests and getting 100%. Once learners pass a test or a level, give them something to show they’ve done well. Badges in digital learning can be awarded to learners each time they demonstrate knowledge or competence.  These "trophies" attest to the fact that learners have successfully completed specific stages in a program. Badges can be used for both internal and external accreditations. Elucidat is an eLearning authoring tool that lets you create simple achievement badges to help you add a simple gamification element to your eLearning. Here’s a quick screenshot to show how badges are created inside Elucidat: What’s more, badges and achievement rewards can be used to "unlock" levels in your course. This shows learners they have to reach a certain competency before they can move on. I like using badges in compliance training to demonstrate the competence of a workforce. Learners also like badges because they can transform dry content into a fun and competitive experience. Related: Stay on top of the latest eLearning ideas, trends, and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. Next Steps  Browse these excellent examples of gamified eLearning programs on Elearning Superstars: BBC and LEO: Finance Game McDonald’s and Kineo: Till Training Game Heineken and Brightwave: Capability Academy City Witness and Make Sense Design: Medieval Swansea UK Resuscitation Council and Unit9: Lifesaver This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Custom eLearning Development: 6 Takeaways From Our Experience   In this article, I look back at our journey and share 6 important takeaways from our extensive experience in custom eLearning development. 1. Focus on customers and ensuring that we retain and grow with them.  High customer retention is what we are most proud of. Our growth has largely been driven by relationships that began with one-off projects and slowly grew to a strategic partnership. We continue to build from here and every six months we meet our key customers and show "what more is possible". 2. Learners remain our focal point.  Through our learner-centric, innovative, and immersive learning designs and solutions, we help learners to: Enjoy the courses. Go through challenges that keep them intrigued all through the learning path. Internalize the learning and practically apply it on the job. Enhance their performance and deliver better results. We focus on efficacy and application of learning to ensure that a clear business gain for organizations is established. We bring our TNA and solution architecting expertise into play to chalk out the path for a positive ROI for our customers. Our mantra is to bring in a culture of "Learning as a continuum" and for this we use a Learning and Performance based Ecosystem approach. 3. Innovation and exploration. We have invested extensively on two enablers, Innovation and Exploration, that help us differentiate our learning and performance solutions. Our Innovation team focuses on: Evaluation of emerging tools and technologies. Evaluation of learner needs and expectations. Determining how these pointers can be practically used to enhance learning experiences. This year, the team has created two innovative products: Online Review Tool (integrated with the course). Digital Workbook (To enhance the ILT delivery). 4. Agile development methodology. We have been using an agile methodology for several years to meet the ever-evolving and changing customer expectations. We are currently in the process of applying the Kanban approach to our Project Management. Additionally, we are in the last mile of our Corporate Quality Certification (CMMi). 5. Our Offshore Development model. As an offshore development partner based out of India and servicing customers over 16 countries across the world, our Offshore Development Framework is one of the most mature and agile one. While it has a strong core of process definition, it is flexible enough to be aligned quickly to meet our diverse customer needs. 6. The power of our team. Last but not the least, what has really worked is the cumulative power of our team that continuously works towards customer delight. Behind every single course that goes on to incite the "wow" response from our customers is a well-oiled team mechanism at work. Right from getting the requirements right to delivering the final product, each and every member of our team brings in that significant value at various stages of the development cycle. What’s next: We are in the midst of a cutting edge research to come up with a predictive Learnability Index for custom eLearning and mLearning development which will be a unique concept in the industry. The distinct effort that our Innovation and Exploration team puts in provides the required pointers for our Solution Architecting team in creating newer and unique Learning solutions. I would like to summarize these takeaways with a quote from Tom Peter’s 7 Steps to Sustaining Success: "You take care of the people. The people take care of the service. The service takes care of the customer. The customer takes care of the profit. The profit takes care of the re-investment. The re-investment takes care of the re-invention. The re-invention takes care of the future. (And at every step the only measure is EXCELLENCE.)" This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Training For Results: Is Your Training Effective? Learn more or register now! According to McKinsey, only 25% of CEOs said that their training is effective at measurably improving performance. According to Deloitte, only 24% of business leaders feel their training is tightly linked to their organization’s strategy. And according to the ROI Institute, while 96% of Fortune 500 CEOs want to know the business impact of their learning and development programs, only 8% do now. All of this is happening in what could arguably be called the most exciting period of innovation for learning and development. There have never been more tools and better technologies at our disposal. So why does the gap persist between our ever-growing capabilities and the reception our work often gets with business leaders? One root cause is that we tend to set our sights too low. We sweat and slave to make each minute of that training great, but we worry much less about how ready participants are to take the training we provide or just what they will do on the job after they have finished it. In short, we focus on the training activity instead of the results we generate. What if we raise our sights to focus first on the results we want to generate? In this webinar, we will share a model for taking a results-focused view that includes: Focusing on what matters Designing for results Delivering efficiently Learn more or register now! About the Presenter: Chip Cleary is Kineo's VP of Solutions & Consulting. He helps clients increase the impact of their investments through aligning learning investments to what matters most to their businesses, identifying effective learning approaches, and implementing comprehensive and efficient solutions. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

What’s A Real Learner?  Real Learners are people who have taken the Real Learning Project philosophy to heart. To qualify as a Real Learner, an individual must have worked their way through the Real Learning book, done the JDIs (just-do-its), assessed their situation, documented their work and personal goals, set up their learning environment (solid content, productive social networks), reflected on what they need to know and how they’re progressing, developed their own approach to learning, worked out loud, and shared knowledge with colleagues. They will have practiced these activities to the point that they become second nature. Real Learners are equipped to learn from experience, to work smarter, and to convert their aspirations into realities. Real Learners are street-smart with social and experiential learning because they’ve experienced them doing the exercises in the book. They are accustomed to working on their own initiative. Real Learners reflect on their strengths, wants, aspirations, and dreams. From this they derive written goals, which they document in a Progress Log. The goals provide the motivation to strive to work smarter, learn what you need to know, and do what it takes to become who you are. Intrinsic motivation is a powerful motivator. You can spot Real Learners from their behavior. You know you have found one when you see someone: Documenting work, career, and personal goals in writing. Taking on stretch experiences, welcoming the buzz of taking appropriate risks. Socializing, sharing, conversing, and actively participating in communities. Filtering out bad information and time wasters, tapping best resources. Spending 15 minutes at the end of each day reflecting on what was learned. Assessing the best way to learn a new skill. Working out loud. Mentoring others. Confident in their ability to become smarter and more effective. My hope, and it seems only natural, is that Real Learners will lead happier, fulfilling lives. It’s inevitable they will be more successful at work than their naïve peers. Not everyone is cut out to be a Real Learner. It takes drive to change basic behavior. Probably fewer than 10% of people who start the book will earn the designation. Does this mean that the Real Learning Project is a failure? Not at all. Those who do become Real Learners are high performers; they make the program worthwhile. Many participants who do not become Real Learners will benefit from bits and pieces of the project; they simply won’t master all of its aspects. Not For Everybody  People who are wedded to the concept that schooling is the "one best way" of learning will not buy the informal concept of Real Learning. Schooling that might have been appropriate for a child in an unchanging world is not the way adults learn best in a turbulent environment. Lots of people can’t get this into their heads. They call for courses, instructors, curriculum, and grades. Some argue (absurdly) that this school paraphernalia is a prerequisite for learning. Making big behavior changes like becoming a Real Learner takes endurance. Some people’s attention span is too short to stay the course. Early on, participants check their Grit scores and mindset. Low scores predict a lack of stick-to-it-iveness. We may produce a skimmable comic-book version for people with no time or attention span. Many people simply don’t read books. 40% of Americans did not read a single non-fiction book last year. Maybe our web version will appeal to them. Half the people who do read business books only get to page 12 before tossing them aside. Changing one’s behavior takes perseverance and dedication. You have to believe you are in control. You have to have faith. You assess your situation, write down your goals, and begin having thought experiments. In time, this rewires your brain, making you more purposeful and intelligent. That’s a great reward, to become a confident meta-learner. This is a long-term process. It’s easy to fall out of the program. Death in the family. Dirty laundry. Overdue bills. Crisis at work. Sick dog. Soccer games. Fender bender. Heavy travel schedule. 60-hour weeks. Doing two people’s jobs. Budget is due. Warning light flashing in car. Brother coming to visit. Let’s see, you were noting your progress daily? While lots of readers will take some useful ideas from Real Learning, I expect only 7% of them will become practicing Real Learners. Seven Out Of A hundred  I’m going to draw on my experience with the Boy Scouts to provide an analogy. Scouting helped me deal with moving from Texas to Rhode Island to France in 16 months. The Scouting community was my anchor. I led an international troop with boys from 18 countries. I learned many skills and a lot about life. I am an Eagle Scout, the result of earning 21 merit badges. You get to wear a medal! For me, becoming an Eagle meant that I’d bought into being trustworthy, loyal, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. I would do my best to do my duty to God and my country. At age 13, these were my personal values. Seven percent of all Boy Scouts become Eagle Scouts. I’ll be optimistic and hope that 7% of the people who tackle the Real Learning book and exercises become Real Learners, and that they will be as dedicated to Real Learning as I was to Boy Scouts. Real Learners Real Learners embrace the values of openness, honesty, transparency, sharing, reciprocity, daring, authenticity, tracking, and reflecting. If attaining Real Learner status were a matter of merit badges, here is what they might be:   Self assessment and goal setting.     Setting up a learning environment.     Adventure. Taking on stretch assignments.     Community building and participation.     Daily Reflection. 15 minutes contemplation.     Working out loud. Shares insights.     Mentoring. Helps others learn.   Meta-learning. Has learned to learn.     You judge a Real Learner by outcomes, not by passing a merit badge test. A Real Learner: Plans how to achieve growth goals. Works smarter and makes an impact. Learns faster and remembers more. Embraces openness and learns out loud. Makes sound learning a lifelong habit. Co-creates knowledge with colleagues. Becomes the person they aspire to be. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Top Cloud Based Learning Management Systems For Corporate Training Moving your corporate training online has many advantages. Employees’ access to training resources in their moment of need, cost reduction of training materials and on-site instructors and increased employee engagement are just a few of the benefits you can expect to receive. However, before you can reap all these rewards, you must first choose a cloud based Learning Management System that meets the training requirements of your organization. Let’s take a look at the top choices of cloud based LMSs for corporate training. Adobe Captivate Prime A modern LMS that empowers you to setup, deliver, and track learning all by yourself. Maximize learning impact by developing skill-based learning programs. Play all kinds of content seamlessly with our Fluidic Player that also allows note-taking to facilitate revision. Foster a learning culture using gamification and mobile learning. Value Drivers: Offer stimulating learner experiences Set up quickly and manage easily Maximize learning impact Establish a learning culture Litmos This cloud based LMS offers employees, customer and channel partners the opportunity to improve their skills and stay up-dated on company policies, compliance and other training needs on virtually any smartphone or tablet. Litmos is one the most popular learning management systems for corporations with over 1 million users which enables corporate learners to get the compliance, customer service, and performance training they need by using any mobile device. Docebo When it comes to features, Docebo is one of the front runners in the training LMS industry. It is also user-friendly and offers you the ability to only pay for what you use. With Docebo, you can even rebrand your eLearning platform to offer your corporate learners a professional training experience that truly reflects your company’s image. Employees can access Docebo online training courses via a mobile application, which means that they can receive the information they need, when they need it the most, that is basically, on the sales floor. TalentLMS TalentLMS is a super-easy, SCORM & TinCan certified, cloud LMS to train your employees, partners, customers or students. Create your eLearning portal in 30'' & build stunning courses with minimal effort, reusing your presentations and videos or a wide range of online material with our social integrations. Fully customizable to your own branding needs and built from scratch to work with mobile devices (iPad, iPhone & Android), this enterprise friendly LMS lets you create crucial elements like Branches and Single Sign-On (SSO). Enjoy blended learning with advanced ITL support, scheduled reports and powerful analytics. And best of all, you get a free plan for life! Need even more? Upgrade or downgrade between plans as needed! CourseMill CourseMill has Advanced Reports, offering advanced tracking and reporting for training administrators. Drag and drop functionality allows you to easily create detailed, visual reports such as charts and graphs. CourseMill is an excellent choice for organizations looking for a robust, yet affordable LMS to deploy eLearning. It also supports mobile learning for companies who need to provide anywhere, anytime eLearning materials to on-the-go employees. WiZDOM Training If you’re looking for a cloud based LMS that caters to external stakeholders, rather than internal staff members, then WiZDOM Training might be the ideal solution. It gives you the opportunity to sell training via an eCommerce platform, including blended training courses and traditional eLearning. The design interface features a wide range of color themes and branding options to choose from and the reporting feature gives your stakeholders access to usage and training statistics. WizIQ WizIQ's LMS training software enables one to provide live real-time or self-paced training by helping to build, deliver and manage courses from their own self-branded domain. Its affordable, easy to use and mobile ready features make it a perfect LMS for extended enterprise training and it features in top 5 LMS ranking by GetApp. Mindflash With the Mindflash cloud based LMS, you can fully customize your training courses. This means that every training experience will not only incorporate your branding, but help you to achieve specific performance goals and training objectives. You can easily update your eLearning content and share it with your corporate learners, enabling them to get real time product and compliance updates via the cloud. SchoolKeep SchoolKeep is a cloud based LMS that offers a vast array of features. From advanced reporting to convenient eLearning course creation, you can develop effective eLearning experiences that reflect your brand, manage your eLearning team and integrate other systems to streamline your work process. You can also sell and promote your eLearning courses via their eCommerce platform. Latitude Learning LMS Latitude Learning LMS caters to a broad range of sectors, including retail, franchises and resellers. In addition, this cloud based LMS is also free for less than 100 users. Unlike many other training LMS solutions, Latitude Learning also offers stakeholder training, which means that you can train customers or franchise employees, in order to give them more information about your product or service. Take the time to research each of these cloud based Learning Management System solutions for corporate training to find the one that is ideally suited for your training objectives and budget, so that you can achieve your performance goals and equip your employees with the knowledge and skills they need to get the job done. If you are interested to find, choose and compare the Top LMS Software you are more than welcome to check the eLearning Industry's TOP Learning Management Systems. Are you still unsure about points to consider when searching for a learning management system? Take a moment to read the article 11 Tips For Choosing The Best Learning Management, that will help you to choose the best LMS based on your company’s needs. Last but not least, if you are a Cloud Based LMS Vendor you are more than welcome to create a free listing on eLearning Industry! This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Join us in exciting New Orleans for the 2015 LERN Annual Conference  The big LERN Conference heads to New Orleans Dec. 2 (pre-conference day) - 5. It’s the most exciting week of the year in lifelong learning! Perennial favorite presenter Fred Bayley will be presenting a session this year on Building New Courses. In it, you’ll discover new advanced techniques for creating successful new courses and find out the 10 right questions to ask when surveying current customers and building upon successful courses. 2015 LERN Annual Conference Keynote Speakers Tony Rubleski, Author and Dynamic Professional Speaker, "Mind Capture" Diana Laurillard, Education Pioneer from London, "Learning in the 21st Century" Laura Wetherald, Outstanding Practitioner, "Effective Staff Evaluation" Jared Campbell, Cutting-Edge Instructor , "Motivating Digital Natives" The 2015 LERN Annual Conference will be held at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel on December 2-5, 2015.     This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

What To Teach Your Sales Staff About Cold Calling  We can all understand the frustration of calling one person after another only to have the phone hung up on us, or the person lecture us on interrupting all their other very important things in life. We can see that it would feel like a giant waste of time. But done well, it can still generate sales and it cannot be ignored. Sometimes, even if everyone feels there is a newer, better way to cold-call using social media, they must succumb to the demands of a sales manager who has reason to believe based on personal experience that they work. Here are 3 tips to train your sales staff to make more effective cold calling: Secure a good list of targeted customers. Cold calls are most effective if the staff clearly know what their product is and has a targeted list of potential customers. For example, if you are selling carpet cleaning services, it would be helpful if you could target clients that have carpets, or if you are selling a dog grooming service or kit, it would work better if those contacted had animals. Otherwise, you can waste a great deal of time. Schedule your cold calls to appropriate times. Some services are more relevant at certain times of the year than others. For example, if your company offers chimney cleaning services, a call just prior to the start of the colder days of autumn would generate an increased response. On the other hand, if you are trying to generate business during your off season, you might call with a summer discount offer. If you are selling landscaping services, a spring call will more likely trigger an instant response than one in February. Use clear and concise sales script that gets right to the point. People are busy and they become quickly frustrated when strangers waste their time talking about the weather. Instead, keep your opening statement to one or two statements maximum. In reference to the god grooming service, for example, you could simply say: "Hello. My name is Roz and we have just opened a new dog-grooming service in the neighborhood. Is this something that might interest you?" Keep your tone light and neighborly. A skilled caller should be able to complete a call every three minutes. Take a short break after every 15 calls. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

What Gamers Expect Of Game-Based Learning   You may have already seen the statistics both here at eLearning Industry and across the web, but what we hear a lot these days is that the number of people who play video games as a hobby is on the rise. As a matter of fact, the Entertainment Software Associate (ESA) reported that in April 2015 approximately 155 million people play video games in the United States alone, and that the average age of a person that plays video games is now 35*. Video games do appeal to both the young and old and can provide a source of inspiration and imagination. The education sector has had a fascination with the mechanics of gaming and its relationship to learning and teaching for some time. Every educator will utilize some form of game-based learning in the classroom at some point, for example merit systems, quizzes, and class leader boards. However, there are now some who take game-based learning much further by including mainstream video games within their curriculum, such as Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program. These video games can be used to teach a variety of topics that instantly appeal to an audience that love and connect with video games as a past time. Evaluating this approach as a form of multimedia enhanced learning puts great demand on the quality of other online experiences being delivered by eLearning developers. Video games have developed rapidly in a short period of time to include rich, vibrant graphics, immersive action, and compelling storytelling. The eLearning industry must continue to evolve in order to approach learning not just as a linear slide-based, tick box exercise, but rather as something that captivates an audience with interaction and storytelling if it is to provide a lasting and memorable experience. Here are some of the traits that gamers expect from eLearning, or else some of the expectations to be mindful of when approaching eLearning as a game based learning activity: Instant feedback to actions. Games require split second reasoning and decision making which tests the player. Most actions translate to reactions. eLearning should do a good job of turning learner reactions and responses into feedback to complete the learning experience. A journey that feels personal. With mainstream video games that offer choice, everyone plays the same game but many will choose a unique path that feels right for them. Some players who are experts in a certain genre may set a higher difficulty rating right from the start in order to challenge themselves because they feel they can achieve that benchmark. eLearning needs to provide pathways that a learner can follow that feels personal, speaks at their level, and encourages them to progress and better themselves towards the end result - completion. Digital storytelling (a learning pathway with a purpose). Digital storytelling is a growing style in learning, and you can read many more articles on the subject on this website. Digital storytelling works well in video games, as a player will often feel affinity with a characters plight or story. They may feel compelled to complete a task or challenge to feel like justice has been done, or to reach a resolution. This is a powerful medium to employ in learning too, as a learner will want to challenge themselves if they understand the purpose and overall end reason for doing so. The ability to lose (and be given the chance to improve). You see the term "Game Over" used so much in gaming, but rarely when those words are displayed is the game truly over. Most players will feel motivation to start again to better themselves and improve their performance. A popular saying in education is that a learner should be allowed to make mistakes in order to learn from them, so too should this be adapted into eLearning. A bad result in a quiz shouldn’t result in reaching the final screen/slide without consequence. Instead you should build in scenarios where the learner needs to improve, and show them why this is important - motivating them to revisit their understanding and not simply give up and hurry to the end. To see some real world examples of modern game-based learning produced for vocational training organizations, visit my website at CH Digital Solutions. *  Essential Facts About The Computer And Video game Industry This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

The Mobile Learning Benefits For The Banking And Financial Services Industry Banks and Financial institutions have to continually work on sharp lines and thin edges. They know that any sudden catastrophic decision taken in a developed country can ruthlessly affect their own profit margins. Alertness required. They therefore need to be wholly alert about the situation. The sharing and gathering of information has to be subjective; bred in all employees of the sector. Question is - how to get alert and readily informed? Mobile learning answers that question with a degree of confidence. Take for instance, what if you were asked about Sigmund Freud’s hobbies or his mother? You will, in most cases, have to buy a book on Sigmund Freud and then scour its extracts to find the same. With mobile learning, you just need to place the right keywords and, voila!, the information comes through. Another great advantage of mobile learning is its flexibility. Say, you have a baseball match on Monday morning; you can shift your eLearning lecture to the afternoon. Way to go! In banks and financial institutions the employees need to not only be more adept at tuning themselves to crisis situations, but also be more fluent with the clients, making them understand why a change in policy is on the cards and how it will advantage them (the clients). Significant absorption. With mobile learning, the employees can themselves learn about a few significant things as they pass the information to the clients. The advantage of audio and video feeds make learning more oriented and adaptable. Thus, banks and financial institutions can create bracketed strategies; underline streams to cooperate with each other and also pass on germane information to ISR and salesmen. They can gather the emphatic points to inform salesmen so that it becomes easy to convince clients and breed them like gnomes. Mobile learning modules are specially crafted to make you learn the ropes in competent and comprehensive fashion. The system goes upwards with junctures and knots in the middle to test your retentive capacity. You are also placed in critical situations to assess your capacity to come out of it. Online workshops and webinars make your knowledge more phased even as you get the chance to synthesize perspectives of luminaries. Say, if the repo rate has suddenly fallen on compulsion, you will quickly be able to gather the significance of it all and hear what the experts have to say about the same. This is hardly possible with physical education, where the books will still be showing the older repo rate. The regular turns and innovations mark a great advantage with mobile learning. Strengthens your core knowledge. Mobile learning may make you feel like a scholar on topics about which you have just gathered the main essence and feel able to speak, say, 20 lines. You will, therefore, have to keep a discreet mindset all the same. eLearning courses vary and range from a week to two months to even a couple of years. Most of them are mobile compatible to allow you to learn even while traveling. You should keep strengthening the core of your banking knowledge and understand how you can improve your performance quotient. You should typically work on the strategy and analysis part; as these are essential to your and the company’s growth. Banks and financial institutions have absorbed that mobile learning is a tool of the future and is highly dynamic; traits that they themselves have pioneered and venture to improve on. The fact that even the clients nowadays are quite well-read, thanks to mobile learning initiatives, makes it more urgent for these institutions to run with the trend rather than buck it. The additional courses. You can take on additional courses on calculus and risk aversion; maybe also speculation to understand the intricacies of banking and portfolio. Mobile learning is about learning more in less time. It is artfully conjured by people who know their job and are extremely well-heeled about banking and finance. All you need is to go with the flow. With mobile learning, you now have an extremely efficient tool to fall on, for information and pedigree. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Why eLearning Is For Every Generation And Not Just Millennials  No one can deny that Millennials (individuals aged 18-34) are tech savvy. After all, theirs is the first generation to have grown up with constant access to digital devices. Some younger Millennials cannot remember a time when technology/social media was not a part of everyday life. While Millennials may have an easy time navigating technology in general, everyone can adapt to Learning Management System (LMS) technology. Many Learning Management Systems are designed with the preferences of multiple generations in mind. Here are some specific ways in which a Learning Management System can meet the needs of… Baby Boomers. There are exceptions to every rule, but, in general, Baby Boomers tend to excel at communication. Their generation has been in the workforce the longest, and most of these individuals were leading meetings long before PowerPoint was even a thought. Because they are usually easy to navigate, eLearning courses are ideal for Baby Boomers who do not totally embrace technology. Also, eLearning fosters communication with tools like video conferencing and real time chat, while at the same time encouraging relational connection and face-to-face interaction. Gen Xers. People born between 1965 and 1980 constitute Generation X. In his article How to Target the Right Generation in eLearning, Brother Sean makes a great point that "Gen Xers are children of divorced parents, so this subset was forced to grow up rather quickly and to some extent learn to take care of themselves. For these reasons… this generation is full of independent thinkers, wanting to do things their own way. These people thrive when given a bit of autonomy…". eLearning is ideal for those who prefer autonomy, as it allows users to access course materials at their own pace and track their own progress. Also, eLearning makes it possible for employees to work from home, which is sometimes the best option for those who truly work better alone. Millennials. Most Millennials easily catch onto eLearning. However, they often experience a level of distraction that other generations do not. Christie Wroten says that distractions such as "social networking sites and gaming apps can… be integrated into the learning plan to motivate and connect with learners on a level that they’re more familiar with. Because social media lies in millennial ‘territory,’ courses that integrate these sites allow users to understand at a quicker rate, and they can create content, which adds an interactive aspect to the process." Most Learning Management Systems have built-in social learning features that cater to Millennials. Companies searching for an eLearning system designed for individuals of all ages and technological abilities should look to most Learning Management Systems that charge no per-user fees. Flat-rate Most Learning Management System offerings eliminate constrictive barriers to growth and are usually a better value offering. eLearning is not just for Millennials; it is for everyone. Is your company serving its multi-generational workforce by making Most Learning Management System technology available to every employee? This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

How To Save Time Using A Simple Audio Script Format  I do a fair share of eLearning audio voice overs, have read hundreds of audio scripts, and I have seen many different formats frequently enough in the past five years; I think it’s worth sharing this simple and effective voice over (VO) audio script format tip to help any audio script writer save time. Hopefully this is easy for you to remember in your next audio script preparation. I learned from my clients who write a lot of audio recording scripts, and therefore have experienced how to save time with an efficient audio script format. For anyone unfamiliar, eLearning audio scripts are used to provide the voice over talent and audio editor the text to be recorded. The audio script format can define which text portions are edited into which individual audio file, and what names to assign to those audio files. Often, if you are not recording the audio yourself, it’s important to estimate the volume of work needed. In the voice over industry, usually that’s decided by the word count of the script, as well as understanding the number of finished audio files needed. Your audio script format can do that work for you, and this format is set up to let you easily determine the total word count and audio file quantity. All you have to do is format your audio script into a 2 or 3 column table. That’s right - it’s that easy. Column 1 contains the audio file name, and column 2 is text associated with that segment. If you have a 3rd column, it will contain pronunciation or special notes associated with that segment. If you prefer a 2-column format, I suggest you put all pronunciation guides at the top of the document, just above the table containing the audio script. Efficiency Tip 1. Easily determine how many audio files are needed: Select and highlight the entire "file name" column, and then from the drop-down menu "table" select properties. From the pop-up window, select the tab "rows" to see how many rows are in the table. The new window will show the "size" listing; "rows 1 - XX" and that XX is your row count. Minus any header row, you have the number of audio files needed. Efficiency Tip 2. Easily determine the word count by selecting the entire "script/text" 2nd column, leaving it highlighted. Then, using "tools", select word count from the drop-down menu. Again, minus any header row, that’s the word count for the script. By using this audio script format, you can easily get fast and productive costs ahead of time from your voice over talent. Here’s what a snippet of each 2 or 3 column audio script format looks like: 2 or 3 column versions I prefer the 2 column format personally, so I can see more script as I record. But I’ll take the 3 column format over any other style, if possible. That’s it. I’d love to know if you have any tips to add! This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

How To Evaluate Training Effectiveness Using ROI    Every year, companies all over the world create hundreds of thousands of eLearning courses and conduct hundreds of thousands of trainings. Courses are created for training both employees within the company and unaffiliated personnel, such as clients or other third party individuals. The creation of courses and their consequent employment in the education process is, in most cases, quite costly. When training the company employees, it is important to consider that the acquisition of new knowledge and skills will distract the employees from their duties and cost the company time. To evaluate the effectiveness of education and its practicability from the financial standpoint, it is necessary to calculate the expenses connected with creating and conducting the trainings, gauge the results achieved by the employees who have taken part in them, and decide whether the increase in the employees’ efficiency and company profits was sufficient to recoup the associated costs. But how does one calculate training effectiveness? Luckily, there exists an all-purpose tool widely used by managers responsible for internal training processes - Donald Kirkpatrick’s Learning Evaluation Model. The model is relatively time-consuming to implement, but the accuracy with which it helps you understand whether your training program should be continued and how it can be improved is well worth the effort. The Donald Kirkpatrick’s Learning Evaluation Model consists of four levels: Level 1: Reaction. Level 2: Learning. Level 3: Behavior. Level 4: Results. You can read about these levels in-depth in my previous article, Getting To Know ADDIE: Evaluation. In this article, I would like to focus on the fifth level, which was suggested for addition by Jack Phillips. It is this fifth level that helps to assess the financial viability of training, its costs and benefits. Level 5: Return On Investment (ROI)  When evaluating training effectiveness, it is customary to consider an additional level of the Kirkpatrick’s model, namely, the ROI methodology, developed by Jack Phillips in 1991. This methodology enables one to express the evaluation data obtained on the fourth level in terms of money, and then compare the estimated profit figure with the expenses the training program incurred. The head of the company would require information about the projected costs of a training program before giving it the green light, especially if the budget is tight. In most cases, it is the management that insists on using the ROI methodology for assessing the results of training and personnel development. This makes the use of the methodology more or less a given when trainings are conducted. The ROI methodology is often used to estimate the potential profit from conducting a training program, and to make sure that the projected costs would fit the budget. The ROI coefficient takes the form of a percentage, expressing the relationship between the projected profit and the projected costs of a training program, calculated according to the following formula: ROI = [(projected profit - projected costs) / projected costs] x 100% The fifth level of evaluation, described by the Phillips methodology, makes it possible to: Estimate the cost of a training program and make a prediction regarding whether conducting the program will be cost-effective. Demonstrate a direct relationship between the company’s productiveness and the training of employees. Evaluate a training program as a business tool. Is Using The Fifth Level Of Evaluation Always Necessary?  Considering that implementing the fourth and fifth levels of evaluation according to the Kirkpatrick’s model are costly in terms of both time and money, it is important to understand whether conducting such in-depth evaluation is pertinent in your specific situation. The ROI evaluation is usually conducted sparingly, for no more than 5-10% of the total number of training programs. The fourth and fifth levels of evaluation are usually employed only to validate the training programs concerning the company’s strategic interests, as such programs demand significant investment and are closely monitored by the company’s management. This does not mean that training programs of lesser importance should not be evaluated at all - just that the use of the first three levels of the evaluation model is usually sufficient. Here are the general guidelines for evaluating your training programs using the Kirkpatrick’s model: Ideally, every program should be evaluated at least on the first level (Reaction). Most programs should be evaluated on the second level (Learning) regularly, and only periodically on the third (Behavior). A few programs, those largest in scope and with the greatest impact, should be evaluated on the third (Behavior), fourth (Results), and fifth (ROI) levels. Once you’ve decided to evaluate a training program on the fifth level, it is vital to calculate the data carefully, and not resort to guesstimations. Should the resulting ROI prove to be negative, diligently calculated data will help to pinpoint the weak links in the training program. Using The ROI Prognosis In Planning  Company managers usually need to know the estimated ROI of a training course long before it is developed or implemented. For that reason, in many successful companies it is customary to use the ROI prognosis to assist the managers in decision making. If any deficiencies are discovered at this stage, the corresponding changes are made to ensure that the training program is financially viable. In Conclusion (Plus One More Bonus Of The ROI Model)  Another not insignificant advantage to using the ROI model on a regular basis is the fact that it changes the attitude both managers of other branches and the top company management have towards training. Regularly evaluating training programs and demonstrating their impact in terms of hard numbers helps promote the role of training in the development of the company’s employees, as well as the company itself. Calculating ROI when planning and evaluating training programs helps to keep those responsible for their creation focused on the company’s business goals, and improves the design, development, and delivery of trainings. Thus, besides improving the training effectiveness programs, using the ROI model changes how the company management and those in charge of approving training programs view training as a whole. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

How MOOC Providers Can Generate Revenue From B2B And B2C Services It is true that eLearning involves high production costs and MOOCs are offered to learners for free. Then how MOOC providers, institutions and companies generate profit from MOOCs? Unless these institutions find ways to generate some revenue, one would wonder why to enter this business. The purpose of this article is to show you 8 ways that MOOC providers generate revenue from MOOCs, discussing both Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Customer (B2C) potential sources of revenue. 8 Ways MOOCs Can Generate Revenue From B2B And B2C Services Charging license fees. It is a fact that MOOCs consist a new "business" in education. Although they are offered for free to the wider audience, revenue is mainly generated from license fees MOOC providers charge to other educational institutions or companies that they prefer to use their MOOC online content instead of creating their own eLearning content from scratch. MOOCs consist an alternative solution for companies, that may not desire to build their own eLearning platform for various reasons; these reasons may include either not having the necessary resources, monetary or human, or they may decide that it is not cost-effective to do so. Such companies may opt to utilize the services of a MOOC provider. Customization Services. Customization of the eLearning content of MOOCs to meet the requirements of a particular client may be another source of revenue. The client’s logo may be added or even the MOOC provider may offer the option for a fully customized interface. Τhe MOOC course itself can also be customized, not only in terms of the look-and-feel of the MOOC course, but also in terms of content enrichment for different contexts though adaptation of the online examples and case studies given, in order to reflect the client’s needs and/or values. Selling of upgrades. Another way to make profit out of MOOCs is through the selling of upgrades and newest versions of MOOCs to existing clients. Given that MOOC courses may be constantly enriched with additional online course material or updated versions of the previous one, additional fees may be charged to the clients who wish to access the updated MOOC version. Charging for every extra MOOC courses created beyond the minimum. Another way MOOC providers may generate revenue is to give their clients the opportunity to create a limited number of MOOC courses for free and then, to charge for each additional MOOC course they create. This is the usual case, when a customer opts for using the provider’s MOOC platform, instead of launching their own. There is a certain minimum number of MOOC courses you can create for free and then, there is an extra charge for each additional course beyond the minimum. Online Ads and Sponsorships. Who doesn’t want to get advertised at a website with millions of targeted audience worldwide? MOOC platforms can generate a great deal of revenue from online advertisements, either in the MOOC platform itself, or within MOOC courses, as each one of the MOOC courses has been designed with a very specific target audience in mind. Headhunting Services. It is not uncommon for companies to look for employees in lists of MOOC participants. For many HR departments, a MOOC platform is the ideal place to find the right candidates. This is due to the fact that MOOC participants are perceived by HR departments as ideal candidates, as they are demonstrating in practice that they are self-motivated individuals, actively involved in their personal development process, devoted to their career goals, constantly seeking to improve themselves. For such people, MOOC providers may charge companies a great deal of money in order to provide recruiting services and MOOC rosters that match the selection criteria established by the company that pays for this service. Accreditation. As far as B2C services are concerned, the first source of revenue for MOOC providers is definitely accreditation services. Credits guarantee that a certain level of competency has been achieved on behalf of the MOOC course participant; as a result, course accreditation is a major source of revenue from MOOC courses. This revenue comes directly from the final consumer, the actual learner of the MOOC course. Although learners have free access to the learning material of the MOOC course, if they also want to gain credits for this MOOC course they attend, they are usually asked to pay a small fee. This fee may significantly increase in case a certification is to be awarded after successful completion of the entire series of MOOC courses. If we consider the number of learners registered to a "Massive" Open Online Course, this might involve thousands of MOOC course participants worldwide. According to a recent study accreditation and certification services consist almost 71% of all the MOOC revenue produced [1]. Coursera is estimated to generate $1M per month just from certifications [2,3]. Live Instructor Support. Last but not least, another important source of B2C revenue for MOOC providers may be LIVE instructor support for the uploaded MOOC courses. Some MOOC courses may also charge a tuition fee in case learners choose to attend an instructor-led MOOC course in order to receive extra support and personalized attendance. Also interested in learning more about pedagogical aspects of MOOCs? Read the article The Pedagogy Behind MOOCs: What eLearning Professionals Should Know to discover the peculiarities of an instructional design for "massive" learning, as well as the different pedagogical approaches behind xMOOCs and cMOOCs. References edSurge (2015), Four Ways Universities Make Money From Online Courses, Retrieved from edSurge on Aug 23th, 2015: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2015-07-07-four-ways-universities-make-money-from-online-courses Shah Dhawal (2014a), How does Coursera make money?, Retrieved from edSurge on Nov 02nd, 2015: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2014-10-15-how-does-coursera-make-money Shah Dhawal (2014b), Coursera, the largest MOOC provider crosses 10 million students, earns $1M+ in monthly revenues, Retrieved from edSurge on Aug 23th, 2015: https://www.class-central.com/report/coursera-10-million-students/ This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

The fourth annual eLearning Strategies Symposium (ESS 15) theme is "Our theme this year is Time, Place, Path, Pace" Share your online learning expertise with California educators and policy makers at the fourth annual eLearning Strategies Symposium (ESS 15). The symposium will be held at the Hilton Orange County/Costa Mesa on December 4th through the 5th, 2015. Having exceeded our expectations our first three years, we're looking for a variety of sessions, geared towards educators and administrators, about online and blended learning. We're excited to announce that Project Tomorrow's Julie Evans will provide our opening Plenary on Friday, December 4th. During her session, Julie will provide new insights into the students’ vision for the use of games, mobile devices and digital content within learning, and counter mythology with the authentic views of teachers and parents regarding technology use within instruction. Going beyond anecdotes and assumptions, her interactive and eye-opening presentation will provide leaders with new metrics for evaluating the pulse of eLearning in their school or district. ESS 15 Keynote Speakers Dr. Chris Haskell, Boise State University, specializes in preparing pre-service teachers by focusing on the use, adaptation, and implementation of emerging technologies in teacher education including gaming, mobile communication devices, portable media players, social networking tools, and virtual worlds. He’s actively piloting and developing groundbreaking alternative approaches to delivering and tracking learning. Catlin Tucker is a Google Certified Teacher and CUE Lead Learner. A teacher at Windsor High School in Sonoma County, she was named Teacher of the Year in 2010. Catlin’s second solo book, Creatively Teach the Common Core Literacy Standards with Technology, will be published by Corwin in June 2015. She also writes a monthly column for Educational Leadership about her experiences teaching with technology. ESS 15 Workshops Implementing and Sustaining a Blended Learning Program Google Classroom - Jumping In Creating a Moodle Course from Scratch Pathways to Blended or Personalized Learning The 2015 e-learning Strategy Symposium (ESS 15) returns on December 4-5, at the Hilton Orange County/Costa Mesa (CA, US). This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

A Free eBook On How To Design Learning Journeys  We have just published a new eBook on how to design learning journeys, which we called "Designing Rich Blended Learning With Learning Battle Cards". It is, in fact, a more in-depth instruction of how to effectively use Learning Battle Cards as an Instructional Design tool (I wrote about this tool here). The eBook is 36 pages long. From the instructional point of view there are 3 key sections in it: Section 1: Challenges For Instructional Designers. In this chapter we briefly discuss several Learning and Development trends which challenge educators. You will find here a short elaboration on multi-generation workplace, prosumers in learning or adaptive learning environments - to mention only a few. Section 2: Design Framework. This is the most massive part of the eBook. It shows the Instructional Design map (board) consisting of "7 Windows of Instructional Design". The board shows 3 areas (Preparation, Delivery, and Conclusion) and 7 spaces (windows) which should be taken into consideration while designing a learning journey. Short description of every single window creates the content of this chapter. We elaborate here about: Window 1: Analysis of Needs. Window 2: Building Awareness. Window 3: Transferring Knowledge. Window 4: Building Skills. Window 5: Shaping Attitudes. Window 6: Successful Implementation. Window 7: Thorough Evaluation. Section 3: The List Of Learning And Development Methods. In the last part of the eBook you will find a table with Learning and Development methods which are suggested for use in every single window. We placed them all cards from the deck of Learning Battle Cards (108 altogether) which make out if this table a complex support mechanism for every Instructional Designer (even the ones who don’t have a deck of LBC). You are very welcomed to download the eBook. You can reach for it here:  http://www.learningbattlecards.com/cardsebook This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

8 Tips To Get The Best Value For Money From Your eLearning Translations  You are using eLearning to train your global workforce and you wish to translate your online learning content into the languages of your people. But, how can you produce eLearning translations of high quality without burning a hole in your pocket? Well, here are a few tips. Start creating the eLearning course with multilingual learners in mind. The translation of your online training content shouldn’t be an afterthought. You need to plan and build your online course with your global workforce in mind. This helps you formulate the right strategy to develop a translation-friendly course, which goes a long way in reducing the cost of rendering the eLearning content in multiple languages. We’ll see more about strategies in the next point. Come up with a translation-friendly Instructional and Visual Design strategy. Use the right language and visuals in your eLearning courses, as these aspects play a key role in reducing the cost of their translation. Avoid using idioms, references, symbols, and colors that are culture specific. You need to focus more on visual content to convey the message. It is important not to place the text "inside" the visual as it takes time and effort (and as a result more money) to translate it. Cut down on audio and video elements. Staying on with instructional strategy, minimizing the use of audio and video components in the online course can help reduce the cost of its translation considerably. For example, if there are three audio or video clips in the course and you want to translate them into three different languages, you have to produce nine different dubbings. It’s better to use only those clips that support the content. You can use more content on screen and interactivities to enhance the effectiveness of learning. Use rapid authoring tools or the text-layout format (TLF) to develop online courses. The advent of rapid authoring tools such as Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, and Lectora Inspire has simplified the process of eLearning translations. These tools can be used to export the content of online courses as an MS-Word document or an XML file, which can be handed over to the translator. And, once the translation is completed, the translated file can be imported into the tool and the course in the target language can be published. When it comes to creating courses in Flash, it’s better to go in for TLF as it provides good support to languages with complex scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Choose the languages into which you want to translate the courses carefully. Many a time, organizations get their online training content rendered in languages that are not popular and have a few takers. This results in precious dollars being wasted. You can reduce the cost of your eLearning course translations by identifying the languages into which their content needs to be rendered and those that are not required. One of our customers found that the traditional Chinese version of his course had no takers and it could have done with just the simplified Chinese course. Develop a glossary of terms and a style guide for quality management. Creating a glossary and a style guide greatly aids the translator in understanding the learning content. They ensure consistency in the use of terms and ensure adherence to linguistic style rules, which reduces the number of revisions, and thereby, the cost of the translation. You can ask your eLearning vendor to include the glossary in his quality assurance (QA) software to reduce the time taken for and cost of the translation. Utilize computer-aided translation software tools. Most computer-aided translation software tools come with translation memory capabilities, which are very useful to cut down the cost of the translation. Translation memory stores the sentences in English and the target language while the translator is rendering the learning content in the latter. These sentences can be reused later in future translations. The software tools not only help reduce the expenditure on translation, but also lend consistency to the quality of the online course translation. Appoint a knowledgeable person to oversee the translation and ensure coordination. A good online course translation is much more than rendering of words in the target language. The context and purpose of a digital course often play an important role in its translation. The firm, which created the eLearning content, knows what it wants to achieve through its translation better than anyone else. Therefore, the organization needs to explain the purpose of the translation and clarify the doubts of the translator effectively. It is better to assign a knowledgeable person as the Single Point of Contact (SPOC) to ensure effective coordination and communication. Conclusion  It is important to start developing the eLearning course with its translations in mind. It is necessary to come up with a translation-friendly instructional and visual design strategy. The audio and video elements need to be kept to a minimum. It is better to use rapid authoring tools and TLF to develop the online course. The choice of the languages into which the course needs to be translated needs to be made carefully. It is essential to develop a glossary and a style guide. It is advisable to use computer-aided translation software tools and appoint a knowledgeable person to oversee the translation process. Hope you find this article interesting. Do share your views. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Elective Vs Directive eLearning  Consumer trends point directly at a powerful and fast paced on-demand content consumption movement. Whether it be Google, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, or YouTube, the trend is real and here to stay. Training organizations have taken notice and are increasingly moving towards on-demand eLearning libraries to align with this trend. These on-demand eLearning libraries are leveraging curated content and internal content and being served up on a lightweight mobile learning platform outside of their traditional Learning Management System (LMS). However there are still companies that are struggling to decide whether to keep their Learning Management System and their traditional mandatory (directive) content and or move to an on-demand (elective) or use a combination of both. These aren't easy decisions to make because of the time, energy, and money invested in previous programs. Using the points found in the infographic, let’s compare and contrast each of these and look at how they impact a company when exploring the dilemma elective vs directive eLearning. A Visual Guide To Elective Vs Directive eLearning Learner Completion Rate Elective When asking, not telling, a learner to consume content there will be a lower completion rate. Elective training is just that; elective. Directive If a learner knows that they must complete a training program, 9/10 will. Having said that, let’s not confuse completion with engagement and understanding. Learner Engagement Elective A learner who seeks out specific content is likely to be more engaged. They understand the power of knowledge and subsequently took the time to seek it out. Of course there’s always the chance that the content won’t be viewed at all, in which case engagement will be zero. Directive Unfortunately, many directive programs start with negative learner connotation before the programs even get started, mainly due to a history of poor programs or flavor of the month training programs. It’s important to get learner buy-in before assigning directive learning. This will allow the learner to open their minds to engaging with the content. Suited For Which Type Of Training  Elective "Just in time": When the learner wants knowledge on a specific subject at the moment of need. Similar to how people search google or an intranet. Directive Compliance: Great for organizations to ensure that they have educated their employees on specific regulatory compliances. An elective training simply can’t guarantee participation. Learner Appreciation Elective High: Think about how frustrating it can be looking through old workbooks or training material trying to find the information needed. When learners are able to quickly and precisely find the information they want or need it puts a smile on their face. Directive Low: Now think of a time you’ve been made take an eLearning course that takes 6-10 hours to complete. Most likely you didn’t need to spend a whole day taking a course, or you felt like your time would have been better spent elsewhere. Learners tend to not appreciate mandatory training because they don’t always see the instant benefits of participating in it. Obviously, this isn’t always the case, but it seems to be the most common feedback. Runway To Success Elective Long: Organizations can create or curate all this great content and it may sit on the e-shelf gathering e-dust because employees aren’t used to having elective training. Therefore, on average the runway to success tends to be longer. If the content is aligned to the current needs of the employees, and is constantly being marketed and promoted to them this runway can be drastically reduced. Directive Short: Success in directive training is typically measured by answering the question "did the training program get completed, yes or no?". If a learner is required to take training content and its purposed is to be tracked and measured this way runway to success is short. Selecting the right type of training approach (directive or elective) can go a long way to determining organizational training program success, for years to come. So next time you’re looking at your organization’s learning strategy, take a moment to run through this list and decide what’s the most important to you, your learners, and your organization for now and in the future. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.